FACING HER DEMONS IN BLANK VERSE

“Comb out everything that I had left / Comb it until it shone, Bunch it all together until it covered the parts that had nothing but skin left / And tell myself, be positive, Anu / Always be positive, even on the days there were more bald spots than hair.

Spoken word poet Anu Elizabeth Roche was 12 when she started feeling the urge to pull out her hair. By the time she was 16, there were bald spots on her scalp and she had been diagnosed with trichotillomania (TTM).

Her family was not keen on her seeing a therapist, because of what people would say. “In school, my friends would ask me to ‘stop it’. But you don’t just ‘stop’ a mental condition,” says Roche, now 31.

She finally saw a therapist about four years ago, and that was when she wrote the poem ‘Hair’. In January 2016, she performed it for the first time in front of an audience, as part of an open mic night at a Mumbai brewpub.

“I’ve always been into poetry and this was my way of responding to everyone who told me to stop pulling out my hair without knowing how hard I tried not to,” she says.

Since then, she has performed at poetry events across the country. “That first time I took the stage, I wondered if I should talk about something so personal in front of so many others. But when the audience started snapping their fingers [a gesture used instead of clapping at poetry slams] in tune with my poem, I felt at ease,” she recalls.

That feeling increased with every performance, she says. “My fear and anxiety would ebb and I could feel myself reaching out to so many nameless people who probably all had their own frustrations too.”

It’s even more gratifying when people come up to her after her shows and tell her that they have similar symptoms, but never knew there was a word for it or that it was a medical condition.

“I recently had a Spanish woman with TTM connect with me on social media saying she wants my poem translated so that she could spread the word within those in her community as well,” says Roche.